A Far Cry From Kensington
‘She was too much indulged by her father. What can you expect?’ said Milly. ‘But I wouldn’t have expected it of Wanda Podolak,’ she said more than once, as if suicide and having a baby outside of marriage were equals in disaster. But, deeply, I knew that she was far more disturbed by Wanda’s death than she could express. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it of Wanda …’ sounded in my ear like that legendary rebuke of the Edinburgh landlady to James Simpson, the nineteenth-century pioneer of chloroform, who, experimenting on himself, was found unconscious on the floor of his room, and was presumed drunk: ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of you, Mr Simpson.’
Working people as we were, nobody remembered seeing Hector Bartlett whose visits as Wanda’s cousin had been timed, I supposed, to avoid us. ‘I thought he was a young gentleman. I never would have suspected that of Wanda,’ said Milly. And I realized she now assumed he had been Wanda’s lover. Perhaps he had. For my part, I kept quiet about him. Not a word about his name or identity or the fact I had recognized him in the photographs. I was sitting there with William beside me, Kate, the Carlins. Mr Twinny the odd-job man and his wife looked in, also, to greet Milly and make awesome remarks about Wanda’s fate. It was strange how everyone remembered what they were doing when they heard the news of Wanda’s death and described the moment to Milly. Kate had opened the door to the police: ‘I s this where a Mrs W. Podolak lives …?’ And Kate described her feelings as she took them upstairs, knocking on the door of the Carlins’ room. The Carlins recalled their frozen horror, and Basil Carlin had called William to his wife’s white-faced aid. Mr Twinny got the news from someone in the street, ‘and I went home and I told Mrs Twinny to sit down and take it easy, and I broke the news.’ William said he was of course horrified, ‘but you get used to situations where people are brought in to the hospital after accidents, you don’t have to take it too personally.’ All these testimonies helped Milly. I wasn’t able to contribute greatly. My mind wasn’t so much on what I was doing when I heard the news. ‘I came home wet through,’ I said, ‘to find the police up in Wanda’s room.’ But I was really thinking of what I was doing at the time she took the plunge; in Grosvenor House with Emma Loy, discussing Hector Bartlett, with the telephone number of Father Stanislas in my handbag.
In the course of the reunion I was called again to the telephone. It was Isobel Lederer. She wanted me to do something for her, and I completely forget what. But I can still hear two bright and confident phrases: ‘I know I can depend on you, Mrs Hawkins,’ (Oh, can you? I thought), and ‘You won’t let me down, I know, Mrs Hawkins,’ (Oh, won’t I?). Whatever the errand or the favour she wanted, whether I promised to do it or not, I didn’t do it.
Lying awake in the night I saw again those grotesque photographs of Hector Bartlett and Wanda. It came to me quite easily who the short man was who had appeared with Hector in profile: the blighted Vladimir, who used to flit round the offices of Mackintosh & Tooley. Fake White Russian as he was, with his embittered camera, it was well within his scope to confection these fake photographs of Wanda. I wondered why she had kept them, and considered it probable that there had been others, possibly of Wanda’s face mounted on a pornographic-ally posed body, that she had fearfully destroyed or had been shown by way of blackmail. This was a supposition that I was never able to verify. In piecing together the jig-saw pieces of Hector Bartlett’s involvement in Wanda’s suicide I wasn’t able to explain with certainty the scope of those pathetic fake photographs and I am left with the memory of Greta’s bewilderment and Milly’s puzzled horror, that day on my return from High-gate when we looked at the bundles of photographs in Wanda’s room. I began to think of Wanda in a new light. Emma Loy’s story, combined with my own new love affair with William, had opened my eyes. I have noticed that people in love and having a love affair are more aware of the sexual potential in others than those who are not. In the years since my first husband’s death, when I hadn’t been in love, it hadn’t occurred to me that some of the people I knew might be amorously involved, unless they actually told me so or had got engaged. What did I really know of all the people I had met in the offices where I had worked, day after day? What did I know of Kate? Or of Isobel, perhaps in love with someone, not the father of her child? What had I ever known of Wanda?
I thought of that day when, after one of her long, terrible cries, Milly and I had run up to Wanda’s room and found her in bed; I had fleetingly noticed, had not perhaps noticed enough, how attractive, bedworthy, she looked with her fair hair down around her shoulders. Not having a lover myself at the time, I saw and didn’t see. I had thought of Wanda as the plump Polish dressmaker, her life full of church and friends and enemies, of Madonnas and novenas and her ladies who came for fittings. The last thing I would have thought was that she might have a lover.
I thought of it now, and I thought of Hector Bartlett then as a psychological case and a dangerous one. A lonely middle-aged widow, and Hector Bartlett banally insinuating himself into her life and feelings, mesmerizing and blackmailing the silly woman with a view to forcing her to work that absurd Box. Was that melodrama possible? I decided that it was. Ageing women were seduced by ruthless men every day. Since then I have seen it happen to women of high intellectual qualities. I have known a woman doctor on holiday in Italy who was seduced and pickpocketed by a man calling himself an airline official at the Trevi fountain; it wouldn’t have mattered, but she took it to heart. I knew of a woman governor of a prison who fell in love with one of the inmates, who was serving time for murdering his wife; it wouldn’t have mattered, but she lost her job. What chance, what protection against herself, had Wanda?
Next morning, just when I was thinking that my notions formed in the quiet night might be rather too wild, Milly came up to my room.
‘I’ve been clearing up Wanda’s room, and I found this stuff under the mattress,’ said Milly.
There were two press-cuttings, one tiny, one longer, and three small crumpled envelopes. I looked first at the envelopes because on one of them was written ‘Haukens’ which I took to be Wanda’s spelling of my name. On the other two envelopes were written respectively ‘Stoke’ and ‘Asherbi’. Who these last two names referred to I was never to find out. Inside each envelope was a small cutting of hair neatly bound with a piece of thread. The hair of ‘Haukens’ seemed exactly my own, but at the moment I couldn’t think how Wanda could have obtained it.
‘She used hairs to work a silly box for curing people,’ I said to Milly.
‘It makes me feel awful,’ Milly said. She sat down, handing me the press-cuttings. ‘Read these,’ said Milly.
By my editorial training I looked first, automatically, to see what newspaper the cuttings came from. There was no indication. No name or date was either printed or written on the cuttings. On the back of each cutting was a roughly printed news item, both disjointed and unintelligible scraps such as appear on the backs of all press-cuttings. But it wasn’t an expert job.
The small piece was from a presumptive Personal column. It read: ‘South Kensington Dressmaker specializing alterations Wanda Podolak phone for fittings all hours.’ This was followed by our phone number.
The longer piece, apparently a news item, was headed ‘Polish Dressmaker Under Investigation’. It began:
Police are investigating the activities of a Polish lady resident in our country with headquarters in Kensington who advertises regularly in the Personal columns of our newspapers. Invariably, the Personal message comes in the following apparently innocent words. [The Personal advertisement in the small press-cutting repeated.]
But what is behind this message? The lady in question, Mrs Wanda Podolak, of 14 Church End Villas, South Kensington explained in an interview, ‘I am only trying to help people. There is nothing malign whatsoever in my activities. It is not true that I practise witchcraft or try to alter the personality of my clients by means of radionics. It is not true that I obtain snippings of their hair when they come to have their clothes fitted. I am a
bona fide dressmaker and a practising Catholic.’
The police deny they are investigating the case of a young woman who has begun to lose weight mysteriously after being treated by radionics at the establishment of Mrs Podolak in the respectable Victorian house in Church End Villas where the ‘dressmaker’ operates. ‘If the young lady in question has complained that she is wasting away,’ said the police spokesman, ‘we are not aware of it and if we were we would advise her to see a doctor.’ The spokesman admitted, however, that they were looking into other aspects of a possible ‘racket’ being conducted at 14 Church End Villas.
‘The cheek of it,’ said Milly. ‘In the papers. What do you make of it?’
I said, ‘These are not real press-cuttings. They are fake. Honestly, Milly, they never appeared in any newspaper. That man who posed as Wanda’s cousin had them made up to play a trick on her. I happen to know where he had them specially printed. A Mr Wells at Notting Hill, a perfectly nice printing shop. I’ll take you there, and I’m sure he’ll confirm it.’
I did take Milly and the press-cuttings to Mr Wells, and he did confirm that they were part of Hector Bartlett’s special orders. But even if I hadn’t already known about Hector Bartlett’s confections of press-cuttings, certainly I wouldn’t have been taken in by these scraps of paper. Mr Wells was not such a fine artist as to reproduce a newspaper cutting which would appear authentic to anyone used to handling them. Mr Wells was concerned that his work had upset Milly. Cathy was hanging about outside his office as we talked.
‘Are there any copies of these?’ I said.
‘No, I only made one copy each. Very expensive, but he paid. Might I ask what use he made of them?’
‘Only a joke,’ I said. ‘Let’s tear them up.’ And we tore them up then and there.
‘A very bad joke,’ said Milly. ‘Mentioning my house.’
We went to tea with Cathy, and Milly cheered up as she always did when she met some new human being. Cathy committed herself so far as to say that Hector Bartlett with his tricks was dangerous, and Mr Wells was a fool, though he meant no harm.
‘Do you think,’ said Milly, ‘that the sight of those words in the press sent Wanda to her death?’
I was inclined to think so. But how could I explain this malignity to Milly? I believed that Hector Bartlett had put every sort of pressure on Wanda. He had used terror, sex, the persuasions of love, the threats of exposure to induce her to work the Box against who knew what people before me? My crime had been to call him to his face pisseur de copie. I intended to do so again.
‘Quite futile motives …’ William had said about suicide in general. ‘Often, something quite trivial …’ I suppose if we had taken our story and the press-cuttings and the bits of hair to the police they might have done some token thing, like questioning Hector Bartlett. But he need only have explained that it was a joke. In any case I wasn’t about to involve Milly and her 14 Church End Villas in any more of this upset. Wanda was dead. And, certainly, of unsound mind. I felt bad about not getting the priest to her in time.
It was after six when on the way home in the bus I remembered how Wanda had altered a round-necked dress, to make it more fashionably lower. Snip, snip, went her scissors round my neck, cutting V-shapes in that expert way that dressmakers have. That must have been how she got my piece of hair.
Realizing this, I felt suddenly claustrophobic. I said to Milly, ‘I’ve found a job, starting next week. That gives us three clear days. Let’s go to Paris tomorrow.’
Milly had never been ‘abroad’. But just as if I had said, ‘Let’s go to the pictures tomorrow,’ she turned her blue eyes on me. ‘OK,’ she said.
It is a good thing to go to Paris for a few days if you have had a lot of trouble, and that is my advice to everyone except Parisians.
Milly, who was at home everywhere, made herself at home in Paris to the extent that immediately on our arrival at the hotel she found herself indispensably involved in coping with a girl who, at that very moment, had a miscarriage in the entrance hall. Somehow, although she knew no French, Milly sent porters, bellboys, maids and myself flying to right and left for blankets, towels, water, mops and buckets, the doctor and a glass of brandy. Milly took off her coat. She rolled back the cuffs of her blouse. She arranged two chairs for a couch and ordered the girl to be laid upon it. She cleared the hall of unnecessary people. The doctor arrived, the ambulance came. It was all over in about twenty minutes. Milly turned down her cuffs and signed the hotel register.
I think of that three-day trip in terms of Milly’s Paris, for it was quite unlike any other visit to Paris I have known; it was full of the Arc de Triomphe, the gilded Joan of Arc, the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries, and the Mona Lisa. Now, Milly remarked that the Mona Lisa was ‘the image of Mrs Twinny,’ by which observation I was first amazed and then impressed for, indeed, Mrs Twinny the wife of our odd-job neighbour bore a decided resemblance to the Mona Lisa; I wondered that I had never thought of it and decided that the intellectual practice of associating ideas overlays and obliterates our spontaneous gifts of recognition. Since then I have formed a more observant habit and sometimes I see people I know or have met in the features of a portrait which has nothing else whatsoever to do with the people of my acquaintance. The face of one of Picasso’s acrobats looks strikingly like Milly’s in her sixties. Many a drawing of Matisse resembles Abigail. One of the Magi in Mostaert’s ‘Adoration’ haunted my memory for days until it came to mind he was the image of that man in a raincoat who was employed by a creditor of Ullswater Press to stand outside and stare up at the office window in the hope of embarrassing the firm into paying. Cathy is reflected in a family portrait by Degas. The face of the self-portrait of Dürer in the Prado Museum, bearded though it is, resembles both in features and expression that director of Mackintosh & Tooley whose family tragedy clouded her life. And the face of that good woman, Rembrandt’s wife dressed up as ’Flora’ in the National Gallery of London, bears an intense similarity to Hector Bartlett, pisseur de copie, as he appeared in the 1950s. I have seen on a dining-room wall the portrait of a calm, proud and noble ancestor who could have been a male twin of sad Mabel, the distraught wife of Patrick the packer. My advice to anyone who wishes to categorize people by their faces is that physiognomy is a very uncertain guide to their character, intelligence or place in time and society.
Milly bought a blue flowered toque in Paris, into the high crown of which she stuffed some bottles of scent, successfully to wear on her return through the customs.
* * *
William was to take his final exams within a few months and had good hopes of getting a job for a year in a big general hospital in London. We decided to find a flat but not to get married till he had actually got his degree and the job. But we had very little time for serious flat-hunting. My new job at Highgate involved long hours of travelling, and the even longer hours of work that are somehow demanded by those easier and more intimate employers than in large formal establishments where the staff comes and goes at fixed hours.
It was true that Abigail and I, as we had decided, could make what we liked of the job. We both did a bit of everything, I mainly doing editorial work and Abigail, secretarial. I read manuscripts and passed them to Howard Send or Fred Tucher with recommendations about acceptance or rejection. If they were accepted I went through them again to make suggestions of all sorts, ranging from punctuation and style to a complete reconstruction. The Highgate Review was well enough known, and is still quoted, but for readers before whose time it flourished and who haven’t heard of it, here are some of the topics that I recall from among its contributions over the months: the hydrogen bomb and the World Scientists’ Appeal for peace, the question of atomic stations and the suspension of nuclear test explosions, a report on an Afro-Asian conference, universal copyright law, the need for smokeless zones in major cities, Germany’s joining NATO, the reopening of the Vienna State Opera house, the case for Anglo-Catholicism as against Roman Catholicism, ex
trasensory perception. Then there was a literary section with essays on Pablo Neruda, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway. There was an art and music section. Each issue made space for two or three poems.
Howard and Fred were occupied most of the day discussing the articles, forming policy, and talking, among their flowers in the large sitting-room, to the frequent visitors, mainly the authors of the essays. Abigail’s jobs, besides composing and typing letters which she was well able to do, included packing suitcases for Howard and Fred when they went away for the weekend, checking their laundry and making coffee. My job, apart from editing, was making omelettes and salads on days when there was little time for lunch.
Abigail and I used often to discuss ‘the Boys’ as we called them, between ourselves. She said that for her part she found it easier to work for homosexuals than for straight men. ‘No personal complications,’ she said.
We were impressed by the way the Boys generally got up when we came into the room, unless they were really overwhelmed by work or telephone calls. ‘I s that American or is it homosexual?’ Abigail wondered. Anyway, I said, I felt we should tell them there was no need.
‘No, don’t do that,’ said Abigail. ‘I love it. So refreshing after the manners where I was dragged up.’ I was presently to spend a weekend at Sanky Place, the stately pile where Abigail was dragged up. It was true that, to a man, the men grunted when you came into the room, and went on reading the paper, sometimes shifting their behinds with a slight shuffling movement of acknowledgement. According to Abigail, when she went in to announce the fact that she was going to marry Giles Wilson, they just went on grunting.
Abigail came to work in a small Austin car she had acquired. But I had to leave Church End Villas at a quarter to eight every morning and seldom got home before eight-thirty. None the less, my life was changing for the better, and better still, in the third week after I joined the Highgate Review, Howard Send asked me to put an advertisement in the papers, a basement flat to let.